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theses

This dissertation traces British Romantic literature’s deep moral investment in the unjustified or aimless idea. That investment materializes as conjecture, which offers a means of expressing an idea without yet making a claim for what the idea ultimately signifies. Conjecture, therefore, is the form that thought takes when it aims beyond what it knows that it can presently justify as content.
The project traces conjecture from the Enlightenment texts of Adam Smith, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant to the poems, novels and plays of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, and Mary and Percy Shelley. In these writers, conjecture unsettles narratives whose outcomes had seemed fixed and worlds that had appeared closed. As a narrative mode, conjecture acts as a placeholder for thoughts that have not yet found their final guiding idea or their final frame of reference. In some cases, conjecture takes the form of an unresolved question: narrators and characters are left gesturing at the place where an answer should go, but without thereby claiming to actually have found an answer. In other cases, conjecture takes the reverse form: the answer is there, but without the question that would make the answer meaningful. The idea lacks its frame of reference. In either case, an idea persists in the subject’s mind even when it is not yet—or is no longer—a live possibility for him or her.
The idealism in conjecture looks like simply being out of touch with reality. Kant, for example, talks about “the peevish wish … one that nothing satisfies.” Peevishness is usually considered a disengagement from others—something merely contrarian. However, one can appear contrarian precisely because one hasn’t disengaged from others; because one hasn’t silenced oneself. Conjecture keeps its thought alive in the faith that the idea does matter and that it does merit engagement, even when one can’t yet explain why.
In conjectural literature, thoughts that feel idle, provisional, or incomplete turn out to reflect deep moral investments in ideas that cannot yet be fully articulated or justified. Such thoughts frustrate one’s current understanding and thus take one outside of oneself. In these texts, as a result, the moral imagination remains collectively shared; the thoughts that appear most solipsistic at the time turn out never to have been properly one’s own to begin with. For the present, however, conjecture leaves its subject in a position of darkness and doubt. And when it does, characters and narrators see how their own doubts might eventually contribute to the better moral understanding of others—even if they themselves will never share in that understanding. The peevish wish ultimately seeks a transformed world, not for oneself, but for others.

ETD_9465

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Isaac Bainbridge Cowell

doi:10.7282/t3-krmg-1x25

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.